Phase behavior and surface tension of soft active Brownian particles. 2021

Nicholas Lauersdorf, and Thomas Kolb, and Moslem Moradi, and Ehssan Nazockdast, and Daphne Klotsa
Department of Applied Physical Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. dklotsa@email.unc.edu.

We study quasi two-dimensional, monodisperse systems of active Brownian particles (ABPs) for a range of activities, stiffnesses, and densities. We develop a microscopic, analytical method for predicting the dense phase structure formed after motility-induced phase separation (MIPS) has occurred, including the dense cluster's area fraction, interparticle pressure, and radius. Our predictions are in good agreement with our Brownian dynamics simulations. We, then, derive a continuum model to investigate the relationship between the predicted interparticle pressure, the swim pressure, and the macroscopic pressure in the momentum equation. We find that formulating the point-wise macroscopic pressure as the interparticle pressure and modeling the particle activity through a spatially variant body force - as opposed to a volume-averaged swim pressure - results in consistent predictions of pressure in both the continuum model and the microscopic theory. This formulation of pressure also results in nearly zero surface tension for the phase separated domains, irrespective of activity, stiffness, and area fraction. Furthermore, using Brownian dynamics simulations and our continuum model, we showed that both the interface width and surface tension, are intrinsic characteristics of the system. On the other hand, if we were to exclude the body force induced by activity, we find that the resulting surface tension values are linearly dependent on the size of the simulation, in contrast to the statistical mechanical definition of surface tension.

UI MeSH Term Description Entries

Related Publications

Nicholas Lauersdorf, and Thomas Kolb, and Moslem Moradi, and Ehssan Nazockdast, and Daphne Klotsa
August 2015, Physical review letters,
Nicholas Lauersdorf, and Thomas Kolb, and Moslem Moradi, and Ehssan Nazockdast, and Daphne Klotsa
December 2019, Physical review letters,
Nicholas Lauersdorf, and Thomas Kolb, and Moslem Moradi, and Ehssan Nazockdast, and Daphne Klotsa
November 2019, Physical review. E,
Nicholas Lauersdorf, and Thomas Kolb, and Moslem Moradi, and Ehssan Nazockdast, and Daphne Klotsa
November 2021, Physical review. E,
Nicholas Lauersdorf, and Thomas Kolb, and Moslem Moradi, and Ehssan Nazockdast, and Daphne Klotsa
October 2023, Physical review letters,
Nicholas Lauersdorf, and Thomas Kolb, and Moslem Moradi, and Ehssan Nazockdast, and Daphne Klotsa
June 2016, Soft matter,
Nicholas Lauersdorf, and Thomas Kolb, and Moslem Moradi, and Ehssan Nazockdast, and Daphne Klotsa
February 2017, Soft matter,
Nicholas Lauersdorf, and Thomas Kolb, and Moslem Moradi, and Ehssan Nazockdast, and Daphne Klotsa
September 2020, Physical review. E,
Nicholas Lauersdorf, and Thomas Kolb, and Moslem Moradi, and Ehssan Nazockdast, and Daphne Klotsa
August 2022, Soft matter,
Nicholas Lauersdorf, and Thomas Kolb, and Moslem Moradi, and Ehssan Nazockdast, and Daphne Klotsa
June 2022, Physical review. E,
Copied contents to your clipboard!